The Lessons of Iraq

Lesson #1: The United States lost.The first and most important lesson of Iraq war is that we didn’t win in any meaningful sense of that term. The alleged purpose of the war was eliminating Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but it turns out he didn’t have any. Oops. Then the rationale shifted to creating a pro-American democracy, but Iraq today is at best a quasi-democracy and far from pro-American. The destruction of Iraq improved Iran’s position in the Persian Gulf — which is hardly something the United States intended — and the costs of the war (easily exceeding $1 trillion dollars) are much larger than U.S. leaders anticipated or promised. The war was also a giant distraction, which diverted the Bush administration from other priorities (e.g., Afghanistan) and made the United States much less popular around the world.

This lesson is important because supporters of the war are already marketing a revisionist version. In this counternarrative, the 2007 surge was a huge success (it wasn’t, because it failed to produce political reconciliation) and Iraq is now on the road to stable and prosperous democracy. And the costs weren’t really that bad. Another variant of this myth is the idea that President George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus had “won” the war by 2008, but President Obama then lost it by getting out early. This view ignores the fact that the Bush administration negotiated the 2008 Status of Forces agreement that set the timetable for U.S. withdrawal, and Obama couldn’t stay in Iraq once the Iraqi government made it clear it wanted us out.

The danger of this false narrative is obvious: If Americans come to see the war as a success — which it clearly wasn’t — they may continue to listen to the advice of its advocates and be more inclined to repeat similar mistakes in the future.

Lesson #2: It’s not that hard to hijack the United States into a war. The United States is still a very powerful country, and the short-term costs of military action are relatively low in most cases. As a result, wars of choice (or even “wars of whim”) are possible. The Iraq war reminds us that if the executive branch is united around the idea of war, normal checks and balances — including media scrutiny — tend to break down.

The remarkable thing about the Iraq war is how few people it took to engineer. It wasn’t promoted by the U.S. military, the CIA, the State Department, or oil companies. Instead, the main architects were a group of well-connected neoconservatives, who began openly lobbying for war during the Clinton administration. They failed to persuade President Bill Clinton, and they were unable to convince Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to opt for war until after 9/11. But at that point the stars aligned, and Bush and Cheney became convinced that invading Iraq would launch a far-reaching regional transformation, usher in a wave of pro-American democracies, and solve the terrorism problem.

As the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman told Ha’aretz in May 2003: “Iraq was the war neoconservatives wanted… the war the neoconservatives marketed…. I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office [in Washington]) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.”

Lesson #3: The United States gets in big trouble when the “marketplace of ideas” breaks down and when the public and our leadership do not have an open debate about what to do.

Given the stakes involved, it is remarkable how little serious debate there actually was about the decision to invade. This was a bipartisan failure, as both conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats all tended to jump onboard the bandwagon to war. And mainstream media organizations became cheerleaders rather than critics. Even within the halls of government, individuals who questioned the wisdom of the invasion or raised doubts about the specific plans were soon marginalized. As a result, not only did the United States make a bone-headed decision, but the Bush administration went into Iraq unprepared for the subsequent occupation.

“But I wouldn’t say whatever the hell we’ve been doing since [December 2003].”

Exactly, because whatever the hell we’ve been doing since wasn’t a war, but a colonial occupation of some kind with no measurable or defined goals. What, in such a case, would constitute “victory”? If they established a stable democracy? If their people decided to love us? If American soldiers ceased losing their lives to insurgent violence? In the end, it doesn’t matter: one doesn’t “win” an occupation because there is no measurable enemy to defeat. We could have left in December 2003 or, in John McCain’s words, we could have stayed for a century or more. It wouldn’t mean much, even if in some fantastical universe we were able to remake Iraq in our image (cf. we could have left Germany and Japan immediately in 1945 even if we thereby weren’t able to remake them in our image; that wouldn’t have changed the fact that the Allies were victorious in the war itself).

Nation-building and war are not the same thing, and that is one lesson that needs to be added to the list. Americans finally recognize, I think, that nation-building is a dangerous and dubious business, but, we still believe, noble in intent. But we haven’t reconciled in our collective consciousness yet the fact that war is, by definition, nation-destroying, and results in a tremendous loss of life and resources. Even and especially when we win. We still embrace war because we still conjure images of purple-stained fingers ushering in democracy at war’s end. But that’s not what war means, and it’s not what victory means.

I am surprised by the lack of mention of the other landmine that was laid by the Iraq War: it’s made the continued existence of the State of Israel with indefinite support by the US populace a much less likely longterm reality as the longterm interests of the two states increasingly diverge.

Be careful what pundits and moviemakers did with it, Robert A. Heinlein posited the “remedy” to the draft and citizen awareness and participation: Make the franchise — the right to vote — subject to being earned by national service.

His fictional expansion of that idea covered some main points. During a time of war, the government is going to channel volunteers into the military. That is tantamount to a draft, with the significant caveat that if a person doesn’t care about having the right to vote, he or she would not involuntarily find himself or herself in the military.

A relatively small strike force, a powerful navy, and a stand-by draft to be activated only with explicit congressional authorization, would probably combine the best of the proposals listed here. Navies can get us into mischief, of course, but they cannot go far beyond the last deep water channel.

I like your summarization, Siarlys, but I need to point out that the US Navy touches nearly every land-based target with carrier aircraft.

Once we get beyond the Cold War mindset carryover, and close the vast majority of our bases in Europe, we could concentrate a trimmed defense budget on a “standing” force more than capable of waging a war with every possible adversary except China… which, one hopes, will not go the way of the Soviets any decade soon.